Most Muslim scholars and theoreticians since the time of Faḫr ad-Dīn ar-Rāzī, pace Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn al-Qayyim, shared one unified theory of tropicality. The earlier views, however, seem to be quite diverse. The later hegemony of the unified theory, together with the discursive nature of scholarly traditions in Islam, resulted in a complete distortion of earlier accounts. A good example of such distortion is the way later tradition treated ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Ğurğānī's (d. 1078) Dalāʾil al-iʿğāz and Asrār al-balāġa. Rāzī, Sakkākī and Qazwīnī were responsible for giving Arabic stylistics its definitive form, but they portrayed themselves as disseminators and organizers of the material that Ğurğānī left, and commentators upon its details. Nevertheless, they read him from the perspective of what I called the unified theory. In my paper, I argue that the veridicality-tropicality dichotomy in Ğurğānī occurs mainly at the pragmatic level. Later commentators acknowledged the pragmatic aspect, but thought of it as an external element that needs to be isolated and neutralized. This resulted in forcing some semantic or logical content upon Ğurğānī’s classifications. But, in doing so they failed to fully appreciate his project. Furthermore, I argue that by contrasting Ğurğānī’s account with later commentators’ accounts of the dichotomy, one can reach a better understanding of his whole project. He was not simply adding two new “sciences”, namely those of maʿānī and bayān, to the established “sciences” of morphology and syntax, but, he was rather, I argue, creating in Dalāʾil al-iʿğāz a framework that allows rewriting the whole Arabic syntax in terms of semantics, and in Asrār al-balāġa a framework that facilitates rewriting the whole Arabic syntax and semantics in terms of pragmatics. The science of bayān, in that sense, is the most encompassing field that was meant to replace grammar rather than to complement it. In that sense also, although Ğurğānī’s work provided later commentators with a certain framework for Arabic stylistics, he himself never adhered to this framework. His job remains unfinished.